Thursday, January 05, 2006

Bird flu killed a second teenager in eastern Turkey early Thursday, one day after health officials confirmed her brother as the first fatality by the virus outside of East Asia.

...The health minister, Recep Akdag, said Muhammet Ali Kocyigit apparently contracted the virus from ailing chickens at his family's home in the shadow of Mount Ararat, near the Armenian border. Lung tissue from the boy tested positive for the H5N1 virus at two Turkish labs and was being sent to a World Health Organization laboratory in London for more tests.

The boy was one of a dozen people with similar symptoms admitted to the hospital in recent days.

Officials say that there's still no indication that this is being transmitted from person-to-person, but another one of their siblings was also admitted to the hospital with the same symptoms, and what of the others? It's possible that they all caught it from their chickens, and let us hope that's the case.

It is reassuring that all of this attention is being paid to the subject. It should make it easier to contain the virus when and if it does become transmissible between people. Ten years ago, we probably wouldn't have been as aware of what was happening in a small village in the shadows of Moutn Ararat.